Someday, I’ll have a kitchen table again. But probably not until I’ve done something with these:

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Co-worker Kat got tomatillos! From my purple toma seedlings that I gave her! My plants are puny and barely setting fruit, but Kat’s two plants got an earlier start and deeper soil and probably more TLC. These are going to make GREAT salsa.

And salsa is what I’ve been up to. I’ve been trying to save as much of summer as I can by channeling my inner farm wife, canning up a storm, trying to use up the insane bounty of my “Straight Eight” cucumber patch. This morning I water-bathed five pints of cucumber relish right out of “Ball’s Blue Book of Preserving” (picked it up at Ace Hardware for ten smackers). The tally so far this year includes 13 pints of salsa and seven of frozen gazpacho. At our altitude, the Ball book sez, you’ve got to add 10 minutes to the amount of time the jars spend in the hot tub. Here’s Ball’s website for more tips and recipes; and here’s another one with more. And here’s a link to CSU extension’s collection of fact sheets about canning (they say if your water-bath processing time is under 20 minutes, you only need to add 5 minutes at 5,000 feet altitude; add 10 if the recipe says to process for OVER 20 minutes).
I’ve never gone quite this insane for canning, though I’ve done it before. If you’re new to it, the Ball book is very good at explaining and diagramming all the steps and giving you a good collection of recipes to try — not to mention the REASONS behind all the steps, and it’s one of the cheapest. Trust me, canning is work and it’s tempting to skip an essential step. There’s a reason my mom never did it when I was a kid; she’d spent all her summers as a child in steamy central Illinois with the damn canning kettle boiling away all day. I’ve figgered out that five pints of salsa equals five person-hours of work, between all the prepping, peeling, chopping, boiling and measuring. And that’s using a dishwasher on sanitize to sterilize the jars. Not to mention that at the end of a canning session, there’s this big bowl of compost to get rid of:

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(Yes, that’s from just one batch of salsa — not including the tomato peels! And yes, that’s my hideous fake-lapis laminate countertop. How I find anything on it … well. Don’t take me there.)
If you just do refrigerator pickles, that’s easier and you don’t need to get the kitchen all humid. And if you’re just going to water-bath a couple of batches of jam or preserves or chutney, and you have a good stockpot, you can get away with just buying the jar-lifter and the little magnet thing to pluck the jar lids out of the hot water. A clean dishtowel, arranged with a pair of tongs, will cushion your little jam jars and prevent them from banging against each other while they’re in the boiling water.

If you’re going to do pints, however, spring for the canning kettle and rack. The rack does make things easier, though I’ve never managed the trick where you raise it halfway out of the water, prop it on a ridge on the sides of the kettle and load jars into it and then lower them all into the water together. For me, that way lies peril, with falling jars and squeals and scalded fingertips. Maybe it only works with quarts jars, though I doubt it — the rack is such a flimsy thing. And supposedly the enameled canning kettles you get at the hardware store — the ones with raised concentric rings on the bottom — only work on gas stoves, but they’re all I could find. Or maybe so few people are canning these days that really solid canning gear just isn’t made anymore.

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Frankly, the tool that I found out was indispensible is the magnetty thing. It’s a little brown plastic stick with a small round magnet on the end, shown in the right foreground of this photo. Scrabbling around with a normal pair of tongs, trying to get the hot jar lids out of their special 180-degree bath is a real pain in the canning kettle.

Finally, a face of autumn:

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This wonderful 4-Her was a visitor to The Gardens on Spring Creek’s Harvest Fair, where hundreds of families with kids and other folk took refuge from the wild time that was the Tour de Fat in Fort Collins a couple weekends ago. The CSU Extension Master Gardeners were there, helping the kids construct leaf crowns. By the end of the day, all of us grown-ups were wearing them, and this marvelous gal joined in the fun. Larimer Extension Agent Alison Stoven had brought bags of leafy materials — grass heads, sedum blossoms, blue globe thistle seed heads, reeds and zebra grass. It was a grand and creative time.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.